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George Washington 

n 

AN ADDRESS 

-by- 

Rev. William E. Barton, D.D„ LLD, 

Minister of the First Church of Oak Park 

Delivered in 

The First Congregational Church 
of Oak Park, Illinois 

on Sunday, February 22, 1920 



D D D 



Oak Park, Illinois 

Advance Publishing Company 

19 2 

Price 25 cents 



George Washington 

By the Rev. William E. Barton, D. D., LL. D. 



Democracy is more than a form of government: it is a phil- 
osophy of life. Governments and forms of government are not 
ends in themselves, but means to an end. That end, as defined in 
our Declaration of Independence, is the promotion of the inalien- 
able rights of mankind, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. 
If any government fails to promote that end it is the right of the 
people to abrogate it ; if any form of government prove.s to be sub- 
versive of that end, it is the right of the people to change it. 
Whether our form of government is inherently superior to other 
forms is to be determined, not on the basis of any theoretical ad- 
vantage, but by the tests of human experience. As a method of 
conducting public business, a democratic form of government may 
be more efficient, safe and economical than another, and to that 
extent superior ; but there are two questions still to be answered 
before we are assured that that particular form is best. The first 
relates to the welfare of the whole people. Are they more pros- 
perous, more intelligent, more efficient, more righteous under a 
democratic — or, if you prefer the name, a republican form of gov- 
ernment — than under a monarchy, limited or autocratic? And the 
other question is : Does this republican form of government pro- 
duce a higher type of manhood than is produced under other sys- 
tems of government? 

With the first of) these questions we are not now dealing 
directly ; but we are to seek some basis for an answer to the sec- 
ond of them in the lives of certain characteristic types of American 
manhood. A republican form of government, to justify itself, must 
do more than to prove that it provides a convenient and efficient 
method of transacting public business. Tt must show the fruits of 
its superiority by the production and the' recognition of great 
leaders. A republic can never be safe, no matter how wise and 
prosperous its people are, if its leaders are weak men or designing 
demagogues. Just now, when autocracy has been driven from the 
throne, it belongs to America, which stands before the world as 
the harbinger of a world-wide democracy, to prove the worth of its 
system of government in the nobility of its leadership. That is 
why we are devoting three Sunday evenings to the contemplation 
of three successive types of American character. Thev are 
three very different men, but men with these two elements in com- 
mon — first that each of them became the President of the United 
States, and at the close of his term of office was re-elected. The 
other is that each of these three men came, by no fiat of superior 



authority, but by common consent of the people, to stand, each in 
his own generation, as typical, and in many respects as the typical 
American, the foremost exponent in his generation of American 
life and character. 

I present to you, therefore, three men, before whose uncrowned 
manhood kings have come to bow reverently, and in whom the 
world has successively discovered the genius and prophecy of the 
American ideal — George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore 
Roosevelt. 

Perspective For a Dispassionate View of Washington 

It is more than a hundred and twenty years since George Wash- 
ington died. The last of his companions at arms has been mus- 
tered out. The last of the goodly company of those who knew him 
in life and whose later years were devoted to recalling memories 
and industriously inventing myths about him has entered into 
rest. I cannot recall within the last dozen years a newspaper ac- 
count of the death of any of his body servants. We are beyond 
the point where anyone can rise up out of the void and trouble 
our souls with new facts about the career of Washington. The 
evidence is all in. 

We are able to pass a discriminating judgment upon the char- 
acter of Washington as his early biographers could not possibly 
have done, and to do this about as dispassionately as will be pos- 
sible to future generations. This is well for us. Great men are 
often lost to view amid the foothills of their own contemporaries. 
I once sailed up the Columbia River until it was impossible to 
discern the top of Mount Hood ; but at a distance of twenty miles 
the wedge of its glistening summit cleaves the blue heaven at an 
altitude which sinks all lower hills into insignificance. One re- 
quires distance and perspective if he would judge of the altitude 
of anything much above his own height. 

There was a time, covering perhaps the first half century after 
the death of Washington, when excessive adulation characterized 
the ordinary estimate of his life. It is hard for us to read with 
patience the panegyrics of that period. They move us as little 
as Canova's statute of Washington in the toga of a Roman senator. 
It is good sculpture, but we have lost the man ; and have gained 
instead a barren and unsatisfying substitute created by the eulr)- 
gists. To this epoch of apotheosis in popular thought there suc- 
ceeded another and reactionary epoch. I very well remember hear- 
ing Albion W. Tourgee in a lecture .speak with something hardly 
less than scorn both of the generalship and the statesmanship of 
Washington. He ridiculed the vanity of Washington in having his 
horses' hoofs blacked and not forgetting to charge the govern- 
ment with the dollar that it cost him, and demanded to know how 
Washington might have handled an army like that of General 
Grant. 

We have succeeded to a third and more happy period than 
either. Washington to us is not the demigod, but a very human 

Gift 
Author 



man with limitations and weaknesses which we freely acknowledge. 
But, on the other hand, he has ceased to be a commonplace hero. 
We are still living in the lingering smoke of the world-war, but 
we are far enough from our Civil War with its galaxy of strong 
and able soldiers to see them also in perspective, and to estimate 
Washington somewhat more dispassionately than was possible 
thirty or forty years ago. We have had generals enough and 
Presidents enough and statesmen enough to afford us ample com- 
parisons, and to enable us to pass upon the name and character 
of our first great general and President and statesman as was not 
possible to any earlier generation. 

The Real George Washington 

It might, indeed, be said that there is one characteristic of the 
time in which we live unfavorable to the proper estimate of a char- 
acter like Washington. There is prevalent at the present time a 
passion for turning men's reputations inside out. We have a flood 
of books on the real George Washington and the real Benjamin 
Franklin. It has come to be popular to prove that Aaron Burr 
and Benedict Arnold were the real patriots, and to overturn any 
hero-worshiping assumption that any good man was as good as 
has been thought, or any great man unqualifiedly great. It takes 
real courage to speak on George Washington without producing 
any evidence that militates against his true greatness. Painful as 
it is, I am compelled to confess that the George Washington of 
whom I am to speak is the Washington already familiar to you. 
I have no new and startling facts to disclose. So far as I know 
it was Washington and not John Hancock who drove the British 
from Boston, and it was Benedict Arnold and not Washington 
who betrayed West Point. If there is any real George Wash- 
ington I have been able to discover him only in the Washington 
familiar to us from our childhood ; and I believe that estimate 
of his life and character which exists in the popular mind is es- 
sentially the true estimate ; far more true than that of a petty 
school of historians who exhibit amazing ability in discerning 
a knot-hole in a barn door without ever finding the barn. 

It is wholly unjust to an historical character to demand that 
he be judged by any other standard than that of the age in which 
he lived. We have no moral right to ask how Washington would 
have handled Grant's army at Lookout Mountain, or that of Foch 
at the Battle of the Marne, or how he would have dealt with the 
diplomatic questions that beset John Hay in protecting the in- 
tegrity of China, or Woodrow Wilson in dealing with the League 
of Nations. We do not know, and it is idle to ask, unless we also 
ask with what different preparation and experience and equipment 
Washington would probably have approached these hypothetical 
situations. The real question to ask is : How did George Wash- 
ington face the problems of his own age? How did he handle the 
forces that rallied about him when he unsheathed his sword under 
the Cambridge elm? How did he behave in the battles which he 
actually fought? How did he address himself to the political situa- 



tions attending the organization of a new republic? Washington 
at Lookout Mountain or at Chateau Thierry would have been an 
historic absurdity, but Washington at Dorchester Heights, at Tren- 
ton, at Princeton, was very far from being absurd. He was indeed 
a close approach to the sublime. Washington facing the problems 
of Grant or of Roosevelt or Wilson would haveibeen an anachron- 
ism, but Washington presiding over the Continental Congress, 
bringing order out of chaos in a new and untried government, hold- 
ing together the discordant elements in a strong but heterogeneous 
cabinet, and creating out of raw material a nation, that Washing- 
ton was no anachronism. He was a Saul among his contemporaries 
— standing head and shoulders above them. He was the man for 
the time and the place — the man called of God to create a nation, 
and bequeath to posterity a new and noble ideal of national heroism 
and national character. 

An Outline of His Life 

George Washington was born in Westmoreland County, Vir- 
ginia, February 22 (O. S. 11), 1732, son of Augustine and Mary 
(Ball) Washington. His early education was defective. He ac- 
quired a dignified and correct English style in writing, and he 
accumulated books in moderate numbers, but was never a great 
reader. He had a taste for the sea, and at one time in his boyhood 
had agreed to go as a sailor, but gave up the plan in deference to 
the desire of his mother. He studied surveying, and was fond of 
military pursuits. In October, 1753, he made a journey to Ohio 
as the messenger of Governor Dinwiddle, and on his return was 
appointed Lieutenant Colonel of a Virginia regiment. In 1754 he 
defeated a force of French and Indians at Great Meadows, and in 
1755 was with Braddock when that officer's army was defeated and 
its general killed at Fort DuQuepMe, there acquitting himself with 
valor. On his return he was made commander of the Virginia 
forces, being then but twenty-three years of age. 

In January, 1759, he married Martha Dandridge, widow of Dan- 
iel Parke Custis, whose own wealth, added to that which he had 
inherited, made him one of the richest men in the colonies. For 
fifteen years his life was that of the prosperous Virginia planter. 
He was a large slave owner, was greatly interested in the various 
operations of his farm, and was a consistent member and vestryman 
in the Episcopal Church. He was for years a member of the House 
of Burgesses, but as the business transacted was mostly of a local 
nature, there is little record of his political activity, beyond the tra- 
dition that he seldom spoke, but when he rose was always certain 
to speak wisely and to the point. 

On the outbreak of the Revolution he was made Commander- 
in-Chief, and served till the end of the war, refusing all compen- 
sation except his expenses. 

In 1787 he was chairman of the Constitutional Convention, and 
it was largely to his wisdom and tact that that body was able to 
complete its work successfully and to form that "more perfect 
union" which expressed the chief purpose of that instrument. 



He was the first President of the United States, the office be- 
ing made to fit the man. He served for two terms of four years 
each, and declining re-election, retired to his farm at Mount Vernon, 
where he spent his remaining years quietly and with honor. He 
died December 14, 1799, lamented by a grateful people; and the 
century that has passed since then has increased each year the 
esteem in which he is held by the whole world. 

He was six feet and three inches tall, and weighed more than 
two hundred pounds, which weight he carried lightly. He was a 
man of dignity and probity, of courage and of high public spirit, a 
patriot, a Christian, a high-minded American. 

Whatever the world believed about the character of the gov- 
ernment which he fought to establish, and labored successfully to 
perpetuate, it saw and still sees in him the incarnation of the Ameri- 
can ideal. For sixty-five years after his death there was no other 
name to stand beside his. To all questions concerning our mili- 
tary prowess, our statesmanship, our national character, we had 
one answer, and that a sufficient answer, the name and personality 
of George Washington. 

The Beginning of the Celebration of Washington's Birthday 
The birthday of Washington had begun to be celebrated while 
he was alive and in command of the armies. As early as 1781 the 
custom began. We find scarcely any reference to it in Washing- 
ton's own voluminous correspondence, but gather the information 
entirely from other sources. At first the celebration was on the 
11th of February, observing the old style date. Accordingly, on 
February 12, 1781, Count Rochambeau, writing to General Wash- 
ington from Newport says : "Yesterday was the anniversary of your 
Excellency's birth. We have to celebrate that birthday today by 
reason of the Lord's day, and we will celebrate it with the sole re- 
gret that your Excellency be not a witness of the eifusion and glad- 
ness of our hearts." Washington, who was then at New Windsor, 
N. Y., in winter quarters, watching his opportunity to strike the 
final blow which later he dealt at Yorktown, briefly acknowledged 
the "flattering distinction," and spoke of it as "an honor for which 
I dare not attempt to express my gratitude." 

After the British had departed, and the war had closed, a great 
celebration of the day occurred in 1784. In New York City, which 
was still in ashes as the result of the great fire of 1776, church bells 
rang, flags decorated the houses, a saluate of thirteen guns was 
fired, and the day was celebrated, as the old records run, "with hilar- 
ity and manly decorum." The number thirteen was prominent in 
all the early celebrations. Thirteen guns were fired, and thirteen 
toasts were drunk. On the 22nd of February, 1800, was celebrated 
the memorial of Washington by an act of Congress, for Washing- 
ton had died just before the old year went out, and for several years 
something of sadness tinged the anniversaries. Even now, every 
Potomac River steamer passing Mount Vernon tolls its bell in 
sorrow that so great and good a man could die. But the funereal 



character of the day soon passed, and now uninterruptedly for 
more than 100 years this day has been celebrated as a festival of 
patriotism. No anniversary of the birth of Washington should 
pass without the reverent mention of his name. 

The Youth of Washington 

Let us remember the, lesson of Washington's youth. I hold no 
brief for the biography of the Rev. Mason Weems. From the 
standpoint of critical scholarship it has nothing to commend it, and 
in some respects it deserves the mirthful scorn with which it has 
come to be regarded. Yet before it is wholly laughed out of court,, 
let it be remembered that it was published within a few months of 
Washington's death, by a minister who had known him well, and 
it met with apparent approval from Washington's relatives and 
close friends. Concerning even the "little hatchet story," which 
has been the subject of more jokes than any other incident in 
American history, this deserves to be remembered, that the story 
is neither unworthy nor inherently improbable. Even if Mr. Weems 
colored it — as he probably did — it may well have had 'a substantial 
basis of fact. But if that incident itself were wholly false (and 
there is no reason why we should think so) it was a story which 
could not have gained currency in the neighborhood where Wash- 
ington had lived unless it had been believed by those who knew him 
that from his boyhood he had borne a reputation for truthfulness. 

Those precise and perhaps somewhat priggish rules which 
Washington laboriously copied in his youth were certainly not 
original with him, and he never pretended that they were ; but he 
made them his own, and they are worthy principles for the guid- 
ance of aspiring youth. 

We do not know very much about Washington's boyhood, but 
what we know is all worthy. 

Attempts to Deify Washington 
When we come to the manhood of Washington we meet the 
embarrassment of his excessive adulation at the hands of the gen- 
eration immediately following his decease. Something of their 
feeling toward him we discover in Greenough's marble statue of 
Washington in classic nudity. It appeals to nothing that is normal 
in American life, and it wakens an irreverent, and I think not un- 
wholesome, mirth. Greenough seems to have said in his heart: 
"It would be blasphemous for us to think that so great a man as 
Washington should ever have worn so commonplace a garment as 
breeches," but the average American, seeing the nearly naked 
Father of His Country exposed to our uncertain climate, as 
Greenough's heroic statue displays him, has no natural emotion of 
reverent admiration ; on the contrary, he sees in imagination George 
Washington emerging from the bathroom and yelling to Martha 
to bring him his clothes. 

Great Men As Products and Prophets of Their Times 
The attempts to make Washington a deity have enlarged the 
material for American humor, and that is one evidence of the cs- 



sential sanity of the American mind. But we must be on our guard 
lest we permit that healthful reaction against excessive adulation 
to carry us to the more dangerous extreme of denying to Wash- 
ington the elements of real greatness, or of assuming that he was 
only the natural and inevitable product of his time. 

"I am well aware," said Thomas Carlyle, "that in these days hero- 
worship — the thing I call hero-worship^professes to have gone out, and 
finally ceased. This, for reasons which it will be worth while some time 
to inquire into, is an age that, as it were, denies the existence of great 
men; denies the desirableness of great men. Show our critics a great man, 
a Luther for example, they begin to what they call 'account' for him; not 
to worship him, but to take the dimensions of him, and bring him out to be 
a little kind of man! He was the 'creature of the time,' they say; the 
time did everything, he nothing — but what we, the little critic, could have 
done too! This seems to me but melancholy work. The time call forth? 
Alas, we have known the times call loudly enough for their great man; 
but could not find him when they called! He was not there. Providence 
had not sent him. The time, calling its loudest, had to go down to con- 
fusion and wreck because he could not come forth when called. , 

"For, if we think of it, no time need have gone to ruin, could it have 
found a man great enough, a man wise and good enough, with wisdom 
to discern truly what the time wanted — valor — to lead it on the right road 
thither. These are the salvation of any time. But I liken common, languid 
times with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting 
characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down 
into ever worse distress toward final ruin — all this I liken to dry, dead fuel, 
waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great 
man, with his free force direct out of God's hand, is the lightning. * * * 
Those are critics of small vision, I think, who cry, 'See, is it not the 
sticks that made the fire?' No sadder proof can be given by a man of 
his own littleness than his disbelief in great men. There is no sadder 
symptom of a generation than such general blindness to the spiritual light- 
ning, with faith only in the heap of barren, dead fuel. It is the last con- 
summation of unbelief. In all epochs of the world's history we shall find 
the Great Man to have been the indispensable saviour of his epoch — the 
lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt. The history of 
the world, I said already, was the biography of great men." — Heroes and 
Hero Worship, Chapter I. 

Washington As a Soldier 

Let us remind ourselves of Washington's greatness as a sol- 
dier. When he unsheathed his sword in defense of American liberty 
under the old elm on Cambridge Common on the 3rd day of July, 
1775, he had twenty-seven barrels of gunpowder with which to 
begin war against the greatest military and naval power upon the 
face of the earth. He gathered an army nominally of 14,000 men. 
Rarely were half of them fit for service at any one time. They 
were raw from their homes, restive under the restraints of camp 
life and fearful of the issue. The Declaration of Independence was 
a year ahead; as yet the soldiers were only rebels, if even they 
deserved the dignity of that opprobrious term. It was not yet 
acknowledged among them that they were fighting for independ- 
ence. The issue had not been defined. They were citizens of 
Great Britain in rebellion against their own government. They 
had no flag save that which they were seeking to haul down. They 
had no country save that against which they had taken arms. They 



had Congress and they had courage — though how they could have 
had both at once appears most wonderful — they had a moderate 
amount of trust in God and a small quantity of powder to keep 
dry — ^and they had Washington. They had few serviceable guns, 
and almost no bayonets. There were no sufficient provisions to 
feed them ; there was no adequate commissary department to clothe 
them ; there was no power that had the right to coin money. There 
was only the smarting sense of injustice and a hot determination 
to resist. 

There was no sufficient power on the part of Congress in those 
days and no disposition to use wisely such powers as Congress 
possessed. The colonies were jealous of each other and jealous 
of any tendency toward centralization. After the first gush of en- 
thusiasm and a realization of the full meaning of war the colonies 
were little inclined to tax themselves to the limit of their ability. 
Congress would call for troops and apportion the number to be sup- 
plied by each state. Six months later it would be found that not 
one of the thirteen had filled more than one-eighth of its quota. 
And the men at the front, hatless, shoeless, weaponless, sometimes 
went into action unarmed, waiting to supply themselves with guns, 
from their comrades who should fall. 

It was nothing less than military genius which wrought that 
rabble into an army. If Washington was not a great general when 
he took command of the colonial troops in Cambridge on the 3rd 
day of July, 1775, he certainly had become a great general by the 
17th of March following. This is what he had accomplished : He 
had made an army out of a mob. He had invested Boston so closely 
that the British troops within it were in danger of starving. He 
had extended his lines to the side of the city opposite Bunker Hill, 
and there on an eminence opposite to the scene of that earlier bat- 
tle he had erected a fort by night, from which he could command the 
site of the harbor, and from this redoubt he compelled the evacua- 
tion of Boston. He saved his own powder and he more than dou- 
bled his supplies, by those which he captured from the British. 
He added to the number of his cannon ; for even those from which 
the British had broken the trunnions were repaired by Paul Revere.- 
He thus brought to a successful close the first year of the war, and 
had by this time an army of twenty-one thousand men, of whom 
only two thousand were sick, and from whom he had lost less than 
twenty men in a campaign that resulted in the capture of the most 
important American city with all- its forts and armament. It was 
a great day for George Washington and for America when he 
marched his victorious force, no longer a mob but an army, over 
Boston Neck and along the street that since has borne his name. 
It was a great day for America; a day of solemn and religious re- 
joicing, and when on the following Sabbath George Washington 
attended divine worship it was to hear a sermon from the text 

Look upon Zion, the city of our solemnities: thine eyes shall see 
Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tent that shall not be removed, the stakes 
whereof shall never be plucked up, neither shall any of the cords thereof 



be broken. But there the Lord will be with us in majesty, a place of broad 
rivers and streams (wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall 
gallant ship pass thereby). For the Lord is our judge; the Lord is our 
lawgiver, the Lord is our king; he will save us. — Isaiah 33:20-22. 

I have not time to follow George Washington through the long 
eight years from the day when first he took command at Cambridge 
to that on which he bade his army farewell, and some of those 
experiences I have hardly the heart to recall. In the early summer 
of 1775 Howe came back and his army with him. Washington met 
defeat at Long Island and in the battles about New York. Retiring 
across the Hudson River, Washington is said to have shed tears — 
and well he may have done so — as he saw that portion of the army 
still on the eastern bank falling before the British bayonets. Then 
came the retreat through the Jersies with an army footsore, starv- 
ing and depleted, with winter coming on and hope almost dead. 
Then came the horrors of Valley Forge and of the winters in Mor- 
ris County. Those were the days when desertions were many and 
enlistments were few, when Washington dared not give open battle 
and there was hardly left to him a place for retreat. Then came the 
Conway conspiracy, and the ambition of Gates, and the cowardice 
of Lee and the treason of Arnold, and a series of persecutions so 
petty, so bitter, so malignant, that it is amazing how Washington 
survived them. Then, too, came defeats like that at Brandywine, 
and battles of uncertain meaning like that at Monmouth. But, 
too, there were victories like that at Trenton, when he crossed the 
river amid the floating ice and fell upon the enemy and captured 
a thousand men ; there were splendid achievements in strategy as at 
Princeton, where, slipping out of the trap that Cornwallis had set 
for him, he fell upon the British rear and won a brilliant battle 
over a superior foe. 

It is easy for us as we read these events in the light of the issue 
to keep up our courage and understand the triumph that finally 
came, but it was a very different thing for Washington. Congress 
was weak, meddlesome, and vacillating. The soldiers were raw, 
undisciplined and sometimes mutinous. There were jealousies and 
libels and forgeries and slanders almost beyond our present ability 
to believe. As one reads the records of those days and learns the 
seamy side of the revolutionary struggle, he sometimes finds the 
question forcing itself upon him whether the colonies were fit for 
freedom. When I recall Washington's calmness in the midst of 
exasperating annoyances, his unselfish loyalty when surrounded by 
cupidity and jealousy and hatred, his faith that put courage into 
the hearts of men who marched hungry and left bloody footprints 
in the snow ; when I remember how after eight years of this and 
more he emerged victorious, as calm in victory as he had been 
serene in defeat, I do not wonder that Frederick the Great is said 
to have pronounced George Washington's campaign in the Jersies 



the most brilliant in military annals, or that he is alleged to have 
sent him a sword inscribed "From the oldest general in Europe to 
the greatest general in the world." (^) 

Washington as a Statesman 
George Washington was no orator. In the House' of Bur- 
gesses in Virginia he rarely spoke except to give his opinion, and 
sometimes very briefly his reasons for it. But he was regarded 
by Patrick Henry and others as the sanest and broadest man in 
the house. As chairman of the Convention called to frame the 
Constitution, he discharged that peculiarly difficult duty in a man- 
ner as creditable to himself as it has proved perpetually profitable 
to the nation. When it was decided that the new nation should 
have a President the office was cut out to fit the man. There was 
only one man to be thought of ; toward him already the half mutin- 
ous soldiers had turned, requesting that he become a king. With 
grief and indignation he had refused this ofifer, but he accepted the 
presidency at the invitation of the whole people. "By this time," 
says one historian, "his canonization had fairly begun." But his 
position was now, if possible, more difficult than in the army. "We 
are one nation today and thirteen tomorrow," said Washington 
sadly. Political parties were forming; personal jealousies and ani- 
mosities were rife. Jefferson in his belief in the simplest possible 
democracy, had over against him Hamilton, the brilliant and ver- 
satile, with his vision of the states in empire. There was an empty 
treasury ; there was no certain source of income ; there was a great 
war debt ; there was an unpaid army. The states distrusted each 
other and distrusted Congress yet more. England was threaten- 
ing us because of boundary disputes. France was demanding that 
we take up the sword again because she was at war with England. 
In all this there was only one platform on which the nation could 
unite, and that was Washington. The people trusted his calm 
judgment ; believed in his sagacity and his integrity. His per- 
sonality and stability held the nation together and brought us into 
a large place. We are today the nation that we are because George 
Washington was the man that he was. 

The Problems of a Practical Democracy 
The framers of the Constitution of the United States were rich 
men. To them government was 'desirable in large measure for the 
sake of the protection of property. They had property and they 
desired that it be protected. 

They did not want the maximum of government but the mini- 
mum. They sought to discover the excellencies of their own sys- 
tem in its carefully planned inefficiency. They feared too much 
government more than they feared too little. They sought in gov- 
ernment a limitation of power rather than a grant of power. They 
established a government of checks and balances so that it should 
not be too fatally easy for government to function. To them the 
police power of the State was small and the Bill of Rights was 

(1) There is good reason to doubt the historic truthfulness of this legend, whose true 
story appears to have been told by M. D. Conway in the renturv Magazine for 1891, 
p. p. 945-948, but it is quite possible that Frederick expressed the sentiment. 



large. The political power of the State, which has grown by leaps 
and bounds, they saw established not in a growing army of blue- 
coated officers, nor in khaki-robed troops, but in the homespun- 
clad people organized as an efficient militia. They did not want 
what we understand by an efficient government; they wanted a 
government which would provide for the common defense and 
express the public will in the simplest and most inexpensive and 
most unostentatious way possible, and otherwise let them alone. 
Many years ago Winthrop Mackworth Praed wrote his satirical 
verses entitled "Epitaph of the Late King of the Sandwich Islands," 
in which he eulogized that imaginary sovereign for his military 
prowess and his domestic status and his political conservatism : 

He warred with half a score of foes, 

And shone by proxy in the quarrel; 
Enjoyed hard fights, and soft repose. 

And deathless debt and deathless laurel: 
His enemies were scalped and flayed, 

Whene'er his soldiers were victorious; 
And widows wept and paupers paid, 

To make their Sovereign Ruler glorious. 

And days were set apart for thanks, 

And prayers were said by pious readers; 
And land was lavished on the ranks, 

And land was lavished on their leaders. 
Events are writ by History's pen, 

And causes are too much to care for; 
Fame talks about the where and when. 

While Folly asks the why and wherefore. 

The people in his happy reign 

Were blest beyond all other nations; 
Unharmed by foreign axe or chain, ' 

Unhealed by civil innovations, 
They served the usual logs and stones 

With all the usual rites and terrors, 
And swallowed all their fathers' bones. 

And swallowed all their fathers' errors. 

No wonder the poet lauded such an enlightened monarch ! Vir- 
tues such as these have never failed to evoke the high praises of 
royally appointed poets laureate ! But these are not the reasons 
why the head of a republican government can hope for immortal 
fame. 

Which is first, government or people? Government, said the 
advocates of the old system ; and government, still say all those 
who speak the language of autocracy. Government is from above ; 
it is formulated in heaven and handed down through divinely cho- 
sen representatives of the divine will. In the Church there must 
be a pope, and under him the several stages of sacerdotalism, down 
to a governed body of people, the laity. In the State there is the 
king, ruling by divine right, and intermediate between him and the 
people are such representative bodies as the people choose and the 
crown permits, and such bodies also as are essential to the enforce- 
ment of the decrees of the throne. 



But that is not the answer of America. The people are first, 
and they make government. Indeed, before the People is the Man. 
Humanity consists of individuals who have their personal rights, 
to life, liberty and property, or, as our Declaration of Independence 
says, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is to secure 
these rights, individual rights and in consequence social rights, 
that governments are instituted among men, and these govern- 
ments derive all powers which they justly possess from the con- 
sent of the governed. 

This is commonplace doctrine to us : it was not new in theory 
in 1776; but it was new as a part, of the fundamental law of a na- 
tion. First is Man ; then, by the determination of their common 
interests, are the People ; and out of the will of the people is or- 
ganized Government. 

In all these matters Washington stood in his day, not without 
the limitations of his generation and his rank, but always as the 
exponent of popular rights, and the champion of a government 
based not on birth or wealth or privilege, but on the common well- 
being and the common will. 

Washington As a Patriot 

Washington was an incorruptible patriot. He was one of the 
few rich men who was not a Tory. A very large proportion of 
men of large means sided with the British crown ; nor must we too 
hastily condemn them. But Washington, who had more to lose 
than almost any other man in the thirteen colonies, was not blinded 
by vested interests, nor bound to conservative action by his wealth 
or station. 

For the sake of the country which he loved he suffered in- 
numerable hardships, was stung by ingratitude and hurt by slander, 
but he stood firm in his loyalty to the cause he had espoused, and 
was faithful to the end. 

An instance of the high quality of his patriotism in his later 
life is afforded by his correspondence with John Adams in 1798. 
Adams was then President, and Washington had gone into his 
final retirement at Mount Vernon, when France began what was 
virtually a war upon our shipping. Adams offered to Washing- 
ton the chief command of an army to be raised to fight the French 
— an offer as magnanimous in Adams as its acceptance was noble 
in Washington. I have often thought that Washington's letter 
to Adams might have been written by Theodore Roosevelt to 
Woodrow Wilson had Wilson graciously offered to Roosevelt a 
commission in the war against Germany : 

"Satisfied, therefore, that you have sincerely wished and endeavored 
to avert war, and exhausted to the last drop the cup of reconciliation, we 
can with pure hearts appeal to Heaven for the justice of our cause, and 
may confidently trust the final result to that kind Providence, who has 
heretofore so signally favored the people of these United States." — Letter 
to John Adams, July 13, 1798. 



Washington As a Friend of Education 

Washington was the firm friend of American education. His 
contemporaries of wealth and culture were largely educated in 
England. They came back, as he observed, undemocratic and out 
of sympathy with American life. Washington left a bequest for 
the founding of an American university. He had not grown up 
in New England with its Harvard College established to furnish 
an educated ministry. His own interest in the problem grew out 
of the need which he observed of home institutions informed with 
the genius of American life and character. 

Washington As An American and a World Citizen 

It is one of the qualities of great men that they seem to belong 
not to their own time alone but to all ages. Few characters sur- 
pass that of Washington in this regard. The symmetry of his life 
was remarkable. He was a man of his own age but he exhibited 
rare foresight and had a broad outlook for the future. He was a 
Southerner, but his interests were national. He. lived close to 
tidewater on the Atlantic seaboard, but he was a prophetic be- 
liever in the whole great country. He was a slave holder, yet an 
Abolitionist and a friend of freedom. He was born in the East 
and lived and died near his birthplace ; but no man in his generation 
realized more fully the prophecy of the great West, or cherished 
more highly the vision of a country stretching far beyond the moun- 
tains toward the sunset. 

Steadily through the years the international fame of Washing- 
ton has been increasing, until now he is almost as much reverenced 
in Great Britain as in America. Notable Englishmen, among them 
Frederick Harrison and James Brice, have come across the sea 
and uttered in praise of Washingtcm such words as any American 
is proud to hear. In these recent days that have magnified the 
common interests of Britain and America, Washington has been 
appropriated as a British hero. Our British visitors have been 
swift to remind us that the war for American independence was 
only one part of a war which free-minded men of British blood 
were fighting on both sides of the sea. Indeed. I have heard such 
men say, and with much of truth, "George Washington was an 
English gentleman who fought nobly for the freedom of the British 
race against a bigoted German — George III. — then sitting on the 
throne of England !" • 

It is well that we honor the father of our country. No other 
modern nation begins its history with such a character, so com- 
manding, so symmetrical, so fit to belong to the ages. "The weak- 
ness of our American republic," as Brice has said in his great book, 
"is the danger of forgetting the individual in the mass, or of over- 
looking- the significance of personal character." It is well to re- 
mind ourselves of the life of him who fought neither for pay nor 
for renown ; who headed an army, but established a country free 



from all suspicion of military despotism; who might have been 
a king, but having served his country freely in her hours of peril, 
resigned his abundant honors for the life of the private citizen. 

Washington and His Possible Rivals 
Washington had many notable companions, but it does not dis- 
parage any of these to say that he only among them could have 
occupied the place which history has accorded him. Political and 
military exigencies sometimes give to nations a heritage of names 
which they must receive and own but cannot claim with pride. It 
requires but a feeble historic imagination to think of General Char- 
les Lee as the leader of the American army. If the fortunes of 
war had raised him to this position we could not honor him as we 
do Washington, even had he proved as great as the Continental 
army at one time believed him. He who reads the literary history 
of the American Revolution can but wonder that Thomas Paine 
had so little to do with the organization of the republic whose 
independence he helped secure. Thomas Paine is a much maligned 
man and has deserved better treatment at the hands of the his- 
torians than his memory has sometimes received. Stranger things 
have happened in history than that Thomas Paine should have 
become the first President of the United States, for there was a 
time when the colonists believed him far more a statesman than 
Washington, and they were accustomed to say that the sword of 
Washington and the pen of Thomas Paine wrought equally for 
American freedom. But had Thomas Paine been as great a man 
as the colonies at one time believed him, and had any political com- 
bination in that time of doubt and uncertainty made him our first 
President we could not honor him as we honor Washington. No 
man among all the generals that fought with Washington on the 
battlefield ; no man in that group of earnest statesmen who wrestled 
with him over the problems of our own republic could have filled 
the place which he filled even in that day ; much less could any 
one of them have taken the hold Avhich his personality has secured 
upon the imagination of succeeding generations. 

The National and International Washington 
A nation changes its ideal of a great man as its horizon widens. 
It might easily be possible for a man to be esteemed great by the 
representatives of thirteen little colonies with a population less 
than that of Ohio or Illinois, but the same man might have seemed 
an adventurer or a commonplace and mediocre man, when judged 
later by a nation continental in its proportions with a population 
fast approaching a hundred millions. Our country is large and 
growing larger. It extends, from Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound, 
or possibly from Porto Rico to the Philippines, and the time may 
come, according to the prophecy of Benjamin Butler, when it shall 
extend north far enough to permit us in that latitude to adopt the 
aurora borealis for our flag and south to where we can fence it 
across the Isthmus. To a nation as large as ours is now, a man 
might seem quite mediocre and insignificant who passed for a great 



man on a Virginia plantation or in the little provincial towns of 
Philadelphia and Boston as they were a hundred and forty years 
ago. But as our country has grown to the westward till now it 
watches the sunset from the Pacific shores, the name and character 
of Washington have proved adequate to the national ideal. 

There are countries in which men worship their ancestors. 
America is not one of them. We have a little recrudescence of 
fondness for genealogy and have most of us become Sons or Daugh- 
ters of something or other, but this may be only a passing fad. 
This is a young man's country; it is becoming a young man's 
world. There was a time when youth that mocked at age was 
eaten by the she bear, but age now climbs panting to a place of 
safety on the curb out of the track of youth, who is bustling by 
in his automobile on his way to see the bears in the menagerie. We 
cannot afford to forget the past nor to renounce our heritage of 
great names. Least of all among our American heroes can we 
afford to forget him of whom an. eminent British statesman (Lord 
Brougham) has said, "Until time shall be no more will a test of 
the progress which our race has made in wisdom and virtue be 
derived from the veneration paid to the immortal name of Wash- 
ington." 







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